Quick poll: What date format do you prefer to see? The poll lets you choose up to 3 of your most preferred date format, but you do not have to use all 3 votes.
Good question, for me itâs anything that has the month name in it. In my country we have the day first but many countries put the month first. So if itâs in an international setting with only numbers and the day is 12 or less, I have no idea whether itâs June 11 or November 6.
Thanks Bubble for sharing your perspective, it is very helpful for my design. Do you mind saying, does one of those formats of the 2 you selected look more ânaturalâ to you? If so which one?
I think that even when the date has the name of the month, it often follows the American or non American convention of day or month first. So, for me 11 June is more natural but I actually think June 11 is better. That is to say, I would not have any feelings of approval or disapproval for either one. It would be telling me what I need to know with no confusion.
Thank you Bubble for participating, your input has been very helpful.
The first three are the best for me.
Putting the year first is just⊠weird.
And I prefer â/â not â-â, mostly because â/â is more commonly used, I feel.
And Iâm American, I always put MM/DD/YY.
I choose 2 dates:
Xierra
Thank you everyone who is participating in the Poll, you have given very helpful input. So far June 11, 2025 format is in the lead. However I will let the poll run a bit longer.
This is something that heavily depends on what the current usage will be in the culture/language of the person, so if youâre asking to find out what format to use in a game, a good answerâs usually to not pick one, but instead use a translations engine that will format the game according to the playerâs locale.
The web platform has one built-in you can use with JavaScript, if I remember correctly.
It also depends of the needs and application usage of the developer: you can be not English but prefer too to use the format YY/MM/DD, by example to ease to sort the dates.
Xierra
Many? Itâs pretty much America and a few U.S.-influenced countries.
But fantastic for sorting a date string in chronological order.
What tickles me about this king of ascending order of specificness is the Dutch have the date format smallest component to largest - day, month and then year. But their addressing is up the whop - street name, house number, town.
Indeed! And you donât speak about their department number, if it exists!
In France, this is not easy to sort (DD/MM/YY also) but the situation seems more coherent.
Xierra
I just checked, yes youâre right, I had no idea. Even all the South and Central American countries are DMY according to Wikipedia.
As for enabling a local setting for each user, that wouldnât solve anything for me because I wouldnât know that it was localised to my area. Unless the date was todayâs date or some other context, it would still be a guessing game.
Just an indirect thing to say about that.
My game uses the âLanguageâ extension to determine if the system of the player if french or some other state as US or another.
That can be useful to manipulate date in the format waited by the user modifying the strings saving the dates.
Xierra
Yes I was asking what format to use in a game. I had initially started setting up to format the date like 2025/6/11, because it seemed like the most reasonable approach to me. Then I thought, I better get some feedback because I donât really know: what format do people like their dates in?
Now, what you said
is really coming true even in this poll. I can see people have wide differences of preference.
I donât know JavaScript so I had to search some of the terms you used to describe the solution so I could find other people talking about the solution and copy what they did. The only problem is, I wrote it to format the date based on locale so it did log 6/13/2025 for me, which is correct. But when I hardcoded it âzh-CNâ it logged 2025/6/13, and when I hardcoded âen-AUâ it logged 13/06/2025.
So Bubble is right, it might be confusing if the person did not know it was localized. Still itâs pretty cool, thanks for the hint.
For now I think Iâll proceed with a default date format and provide a user option to change the date format. Iâll provide a list of locales they can choose from to plug into the the JavaScript snippet and that way they will know it is local and not be confused.
EDIT: Just thanking everyone again for participating, and arthuro for the really nice suggestion he had given me. This has been a particularly educational post for me, thank you all.
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Hi Lucky!
Ah that, it is very smart!
Xierra
